ECS H57H-MUS motherboard review

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

With the release of the H57H-MUS (V1.0A) ECS brings a very interesting and mature product to the market. We do feel it is a bit of a missed opportunity that ECS at the very least did not embed the USB controller onto the motherboard. It's trendy, it's sexy... USB 3.0 is up and coming. Especially for a Black Series motherboard ECS should lead, not follow. Nobody really is fond add-on cards and as such we feel that a native solution (for USB 3.0) would have been the path to take. The SATA6G solution however we can understand being an add-on solution. Unfortunately though it's running over x1 PCIe (only 2.5 Gbps bandwidth) which immediately cripples it down on much needed bandwidth on both the controller and Intel's PCH, especially with multiple devices used simultaneously. This controller should have been x4 PCIe.

Devices like SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 are all connected directly to the PCI-Express 2.0 controller and with its 16 available lanes divided over several devices that can pose a dilemma, you run out of bandwidth. If you pop in a high-end graphics cards that might matter in overall performance a little as your graphics card jumps into PCIe x8 mode due to the lack of available PCIe lanes. In short, the available 16x PCIe lanes are not sufficient enough in terms of available bandwidth.

ASUS, MSI, and more recently high-end Gigabyte boards as well for example, add an extra PLX chip to the circuitry adding an extra 4 lanes, but we also understand that adding that PLX chip also increases pricing, the PLX costs 15 USD a piece.

That said, for this motherboard it's not a major issue and sure, overall we are really impressed what this nice H57 motherboard offers for the money. The baseline performance is on par with all H55/H57 motherboards.

The stability was perfect, and that's of course testimony to the quality build that ECS nowadays offers. This is one of the very first motherboards from ECS that really impressed me in terms of build quality. Good components, more VRM phases, yeah that is looking good. What we don't understand is the position of the Diagnostic POST LED, insert a dual-slot graphics card and you'll never see it again. Other then that everything is positioned fairly good really. Energy consumption wise this is a motherboard that is just amazingly green, showing very low power consumption idling at 50 Watts, and under load staying under a 100 Watts.

BIOS features and tweaking. The options are relatively extensive but remain somewhat limited and it just doesn't feel user friendly. Say you want to increase your CPU voltage. Normally you type in or select say 1.35v. But no, in the ECS BIOS everything is different. You'll need to increase the voltage in small steps over the default voltage. Thus increments of say 0,2v over 1.2 volts. Since I do not constantly want to calculate what voltage that is... it just makes it unwieldy. I want to type in or select 1.35v, period. None the less, the BIOS did allow us to take the processor to a 4 GHz overclock easily enough, so the potential is there alright.

It seems that every time we review a motherboard from ECS one quirks always seem to be related to the System BIOS. And while overall the ECS BIOS user friendliness has improved heaps compared to a year or 2 ago, we seriously like to recommend ECS R&D just pickup a couple of ROG ASUS motherboards, or MSI GD80's to see how it's done right. It's exactly there where the ECS design team seems to struggle a little, while the hardware design side of things they improved really well. And I do mean this, the motherboard as presented today is done right and proper, a real pleasure to work with.

So make no mistake though, overall the ECS H57H-MUS (V1.0A) is a very mature and quite honestly an excellent motherboard, it will soon be available for roughly 138 EUR / 159 USD for the package with add-on cards, it certainly is worth that money. By all means do not forget that for the display outputs to work you will need an Intel Clarkdale processor (Core i3 500 and Core i5 600 series). A processor like the Core i5 750, will work just fine as well, but does not have an embedded graphics unit inside the processor.

Also let me address a question real quick as we received emails on this, the IGP in Clarkdale processors does support dual-monitors. Not an issue!

guru3d-recommended_150px.jpgNow you can purchase this motherboard with the add-on USB 3.0 / SATA6G controllers as an option, however the performance was average with the add-on cards, the implementation on PCIe x1 is average at best. We'd say skip that option. That fact aside, the ECS H57H-MUS (V1.0A) motherboard itself comes very much recommended. Works great, performs great, plenty of features, cool looks, proper component usage .. yeah we certainly had a great time testing it.

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